Here's some data for those attending #OpenEd15. Before heading out for Vancouver, I was curious about the trend of the connection between the conference and "OER." I wanted to see if there was a time in which, specifically, the acronym, became more prevalent. But this isn't a post about my findings... It's really more just a space to share the data itself (although I have an early suspicion that there is a point where "open education resources" becomes more discussed as "OER" which might have implications on how we speak to these ideas to faculty) and explain how you can quickly interact with it.

Anyways, I used Kimono Labs to scrape data from all the OpenEd programs from 2012 - 2015. The data set is fairly simple and includes the speaker as well as the abstract. These data sets can be downloaded as a CSV, RSS, or JSON.

Data Sets

Interacting with and Visualizing the Data Sets

Keep in mind that this data is has not been cleaned, but it is something that you can throw into an online tool such as Voyant Tools and get some neat visualizations. UPDATE: Here are the links to the Voyant Tool dashboards: 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015.

For instance, say you wanted to follow the trend of "mooc" from 2012 - 2015, you would see this:

2012

2013

2014

2015

Two things immediately emerge to me: First, 2013 was a big year for MOOC discussion at OpenEd. Second, the way in which "MOOC" was described was highly varied during this period is well. Seems natural that more mentions would bring various perspectives.

Anyways, I hope it's a fun way for folks at OpenEd to explore the idea of open data and the tools we can use to interact with it.